In his role as chaplain, Father Quickley ministered to the Lincoln Center campus community until September 2020. Erin Hoffman, director of campus ministry at Lincoln Center, called him a role model and a friend who could often be heard singing and snapping his fingers along with whatever he was saying. 

“He was so authentic and joyful and brought out the best in others. He had an inner peace and freedom that was contagious,” she said, noting that his deep spirituality grounded him and gave him the confidence and humility that fed such a freedom.  

Carol Gibney, director of campus ministry, solidarity, and leadership, remembered Father Quickley as a “joy-filled soul” who once brought a small group of faculty and staff to tears with a heart-wrenching rendition of the song Amazing Grace.

“He had a thick faith that he wore like a comfortable, comforting shawl and shared with everyone that he met, and his warmth and joy were infectious,” she said. 

“Those of us that were blessed to know and work with him will remember him fondly and close our eyes and hear his deep, powerful voice and imagine him singing with the choirs of all the angels in heaven.”

A native of Baltimore who converted to Catholicism in 1962, Father Quickley entered the Society of Jesus in 1974, studied at Fordham in 1977, and was ordained a priest in 1980. After serving as assistant pastor at St. Aloysius in Washington D.C., he taught subjects such as Latin, religion, and English at Gonzaga College High School and Mackin Catholic High School in D.C. He completed his final vows in 1995.

From 1989 to 1996, he served as the Catholic chaplain for Lorton Reformatory, a prison system outside in Lorton, Virginia. In 1996, he moved to Nigeria, where he served in multiple roles, including Provincial for the Society of Jesus Northwest Africa Province from 2005 to 2011.

When he returned from Africa he lived at Fordham during a yearlong sabbatical. In June 2012, he left to take an assignment as pastor at St. Patrick’s in Oakland. He served on Fordham’s Board of Trustees from 2014 until 2018. In 2019, he assumed the title of chaplain for the Lincoln Center campus and took up residence in McMahon Hall. 

Father Quickley made an impact on many students, including Roxanne Cubero, a senior at Fordham College at Lincoln Center who interviewed him in 2019 for an article in The Observer newspaper. In the Q&A, he talked about his passion for singing and what it was like to be in Nigeria during 9/11.

“Interviewing Father Quickley is one of my favorite things that I’ve ever done for The Observer and I was greatly saddened when I heard of his passing,” Cubero said.

The infectious energy that Father Quickley brought to everyday interactions was matched by a fierce determination to expose racism. In a 2012 interview with Patrick Ryan, S.J., for the series Jesuits in Conversation, he shared how in 1964 he spoke at length with a Jesuit about joining the Society of Jesus. The priest informed him that to be admitted to seminary, he’d have to have been a Catholic for three years. Father Quickley had only left the Presbyterian faith two years prior. But he sensed there was more to it than that.

“I had the impression that he was saying to me, ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you.’ And I don’t remember him taking my phone number,” he said.

The next decade was a tumultuous one for both the country and for Father Quickley, who grew so disillusioned with racism he experienced in the church that he dropped out of a diocesan seminary he’d entered and taught special education at a public school for three years. 

“But this desire for priesthood never ever went away. So, after a long teacher strike that went on for well over a month, I began to think, ‘Is this what God is calling me to?’” he said.

In 1974, he was accepted at the Novitiate of St. Isaac Jogues, in Wernersville, Pennsylvania. He spoke to two other Black men who were studying there.  

“My biggest question for them was, are you at home in this congregation? And they were both very positive,” he said.

Several people recalled Father Quickley’s influence as a Black Jesuit at Fordham.

For Gibney, an 8 p.m. Mass that he presided over at St. Paul the Apostle Church in March 2012 is a particularly vivid memory for her.

“He walked up the long aisle of the church wearing a hoodie under his priest’s robes and chasuble, and when he got up to the altar, he asked the congregation if they knew that even up there on the altar, wearing a hoodie, he could still get shot, simply because he was a Black man,” Gibney said. 

“In the recent aftermath of the killing of Trayvon Martin, his words were chilling. And when he spoke about the tragedy of this young man’s death and his own experience as a Black man in America being profiled multiple times, he opened the eyes and hearts of many of the students that attended that Mass that evening to the racism experienced by so many people of color in the world.”

Hoffman agreed that Father Quickley had a profound influence in his short time on campus.

“I talked with many people of color since we learned of George’s death, and they have remarked on how impactful it was to have a Black Jesuit here on campus and how he helped empower them spiritually and otherwise,” she said.

Father Ryan, who like Father Quickley spent time living in Africa, said he felt honored the two were friends for 26 years. He attended the funeral Mass for his friend on Dec. 1. 

“In the last couple of years, George has been my spiritual director as well. I found his funeral at St. Charles Borromeo Church in Harlem very consoling. George was seven years younger than I, and he has gone before me. I now ask him in the presence of our risen Lord to guide me on the path to join him with Christ and all the saints,” he said.

In the 2012 interview, Father Ryan asked Father Quickley what it meant to be a Jesuit. Quickley cited Decree 26: “Conclusion: Characteristics of Our Way of Proceeding,” a description of eight Jesuit characteristics that the Society of Jesus adopted in 1995. 

“Men on a mission, men with a passion for excellence, men who are sinners but who recognize that they are loved by God, men who have a passion to be with the poor—for me, that’s the ideal,” he said.

“My work, although not in the university, has been intellectual. We are intellectuals. Whether we’re in the parish or working in a soup kitchen, there’s an intellectual dimension. It’s the insight, it’s the discernment that we bring to our work that uplifts the people of God.”

One of his last public acts was to welcome Fordham students back to campus in 2020 in a Fordham Magis Minute video. In the video, which was posted in August, he welcomed them, unsurprisingly, with song.

A recording of Father Quickley’s funeral can be found here. 

Notes of condolence can be sent to Father Quickley’s cousin, Veronda Pitchford, at 5320 North Sheridan Rd., Apt. 2505, Chicago, IL 60640.

Pope Francis: In Your Eyes I See My Words

This spring saw the publication of the second volume in Fordham University Press’ collection of homilies, letters, and speeches by Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires, in the years before he became Pope Francis. (The third and final volume is due in October.) In an introduction to this book, which covers 2005 to 2008, Patrick J. Ryan, S.J., the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society at Fordham, writes about the future pope’s focus on “ecological ethics” during this time, and his growing ability to “[enter]into the tragedies of his fellow citizens” and “speak truth to power,” particularly after 194 people were killed in a fire at a nightclub whose owner had ignored the fire safety code in the building’s construction.

For Marina A. Herrera, Ph.D., GSAS ’71, ’74, who translated the pope’s words into English, the book highlights the pope’s “boundless linguistic creativity” and gives readers an opportunity to see how “a mind destined to lead the Church in this turbulent time was shaped in the laboratory of a life lived among the people he served, traveling in public buses and shunning the trappings of hierarchical privilege.”

That Further Shore: A Memoir of Irish Roots and American Promise

In this memoir, John D. Feerick, FCRH ’58, LAW ’61, dean emeritus and Norris Professor of Law at Fordham Law School, reflects with characteristic humility and humor on his upbringing as the eldest child of Irish immigrant parents in the South Bronx, his landmark role in framing the U.S. Constitution’s 25th Amendment during the 1960s, his leadership as dean of Fordham Law for 18 years, and his commitment to a life lived in the service of others. The Prayer of St. Francis (“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace”) hung on a plaque on his Fordham office wall for many years, he writes, a reminder of “the importance of being a bridge builder” and “not letting the pressure of everyday life take away from our capacity to feel for one another.”

Related Story: On May 27, Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, served as guest host of the show Fordham Conversations to interview John Feerick for WFUV, the University’s public media station. 

Lady Liberty: An Illustrated History of America’s Most Storied Woman

In a series of brief essays—richly illustrated with 33 full-page reproductions of paintings by Antonio Masi—Joan Marans Dim recounts the epic struggle to create the Statue of Liberty and transport it from France to the U.S. during the 19th century. She also writes about the immigrant experience, and how “The New Colossus,” an 1883 sonnet by Emma Lazarus (“Give me your tired, your poor,/ your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”) helped transform the statue into a symbol of American freedom and economic prosperity for arriving immigrants—an ideal often at odds with U.S. immigration policy and Americans’ shifting attitudes toward immigrants through the years.

“In so little room as the state of Israel and the Palestinian territories, there is entirely too much hatred,” said Patrick J. Ryan, S.J., Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society. “Notice that I call all three of these territories the Holy Land. We must keep in mind that all three of these territorial divisions are holy for Jews, holy for Christians, and holy for Muslims, but holy for each faith community in a different way.”

The history of religious ties to the area and how they impact the present-day conflicts were the central themes of the fall McGinley lecture titled, “Faith and Conflict in the Holy Land: Peacemaking Among Jews, Christians and Muslims.”

The lecture and panel discussion, which took place on Nov. 12 and Nov. 13 at the Lincoln Center and Rose Hill campuses, respectively, featured a keynote speech from Father Ryan followed by two respondents—Ebru Turan, Ph.D., history professor at Fordham, and Abraham Unger, Ph.D., GSAS ’92, ’07, campus rabbi and associate professor of government and politics at Wagner College.

‘Perpetual Migrants’

Father Ryan highlighted in his lecture that “nobody comes from nowhere” and that “all of us are both native and immigrant.”

Unger, who delivered the Jewish response, emphasized the fact that Jewish people, in particular, have been considered “perpetual migrants” and that this view of their history needs to be taken into account when thinking about present-day Israel and Palestine.

“I suggest the conflict reaches into the existential nature of the Jewish people itself, both for Jews and for the rest of the world when thinking about Jews,” Unger said.

The Jewish identity, according to Unger, has always included a sense of being a “marginalized outsider” or watching for the next wave of oppression. That’s why the desire for a homeland is so essential, he said.

If the conflict is looked at under that lens, Unger said, it can be seen as bigger than simply “how much area Jews and Arabs ought to respectively get out of the Holy Land.”

Sacred Sites of Significance

For Christians, the Holy Land is not “a major theme in Christian scriptural sources,” Father Ryan said, although Christians as early as the second century took an interest in the area, and that interest grew following the reign of Constantine.

“To Constantine we owe the location of the place in Jerusalem where Jesus died, was buried, and rose again—now the Church of the Holy Sepulcher,” Ryan said, noting that the Roman emperor commissioned the church. “Helena [Constantine’s mother] is said to have built the original Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem and an oratory on the Mount of Olives, marking the locale where the disciples witnessed the ascension of Jesus.”

In the Islamic tradition, the “sanctity of the Holy Land in Islam is concentrated in one particular spot in Jerusalem called the Noble Sanctuary,” said Turan, who delivered the Islamic response.

“The Noble Sanctuary houses two of the most sanctified and majestic monuments of Islam—the Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa Mosque,” she said, identified by Islamic authorities as the site of the Prophet Mohammad’s night journey and heavenly ascension.

Present-Day Challenges

Understanding these diverse religious ties to the Holy Land can help people better understand the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, according to the speakers. Still, they said there were no easy solutions.

“How can we have a safe Israel within its borders? On the other hand, how can we have a sovereign Palestine state with its own government and arms—these two are not compatible.” Turan said, stating that she still wished for peace. “That’s why it is not that easy, because the space is very, very tight.”

Unger highlighted another challenge: The area has seen its Christian population, which had oftentimes eased tensions between the Jewish and Muslim populations, decrease rapidly.

“There’s a tremendous Palestinian-Christian diaspora emerging,” he said. “This is a great loss for the majority Jewish population because the Christian-Arab population sometimes has been and also can be a bridge between the Muslim majority within the Arab sector…as well as a bridge to the West itself and to the Jewish majority.”

A Dream of Peace

Father Ryan, however, encouraged the next generation to look to history and then try to find a way forward.

“I have shared with you this evening my dream—an old man’s dream—in the hope that some young people here will see visions, visions of peacemaking in the Holy Land, peacemaking in every land,” Father Ryan said.

On April 8, colleagues, friends, and associates who knew him best closed out the University’s yearlong celebration of the cardinal with an evening of discussion, prayer, and fellowship.

“The Apologetics of Personal Testimony: A Celebration of the Life and Faith of Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J.,” featured a panel discussion, a Mass and a dinner reception on the Rose Hill campus, Cardinal Dulles’ home for 20 years.

The day began at Tognino Hall, where Michael C. McCarthy, S.J., vice president for Mission Integration and Planning at Fordham, moderated a panel discussion featuring Michael Canaris, Ph.D., GSAS ’13, assistant professor at the Institute of Pastoral Studies at Loyola University Chicago, Anne-Marie Kirmse, O.P., former research associate for the McGinley Chair in Religion and Society at Fordham, and the Most Reverend James Massa, auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of Brooklyn.

Sister Kirmse focused on Cardinal Dulles’ journey of faith, from his early years in a deeply religious Presbyterian household to his casting off belief in God in high school and first two college years, to his conversion experience and his search for a church in which to practice his faith.

Cardinal Dulles was educated at Choate Rosemary Hall and Harvard University, and his family included a father who became secretary of state (Washington Dulles International Airport is named for him) and an uncle who became head of the CIA. He converted to Catholicism and went on to become the first American who was not a bishop to be named a cardinal. That same faith, she said, sustained him in the time of declining health in the years before his death.

Canaris as well picked up on that suffering—which he saw first-hand as Cardinal Dulles’ last doctoral student—speaking about “the crucible of torture in his last months.” In the end, Canaris, who is editing a volume based on papers on Cardinal Dulles delivered during events at Fordham this past year,  said Cardinal Dulles was like the tested man in the Letter of James.

“Blessed is a man who perseveres under trial; for once he has been approved, he will receive the crown of life which the Lord has promised to those who love Him,” he said.

Bishop Massa recounted Cardinal Dulles’ long engagement with ecumenical dialogue, as well as the cardinal’s growing disappointment with how that dialogue was conducted, and where it was headed. While he stressed that Cardinal Dulles never reversed himself on the subject and “personally stood by all the ecumenical statements he had ever signed,” he said Cardinal Dulles believed “the ground had shifted” since early years after the Second Vatican Council and said a new term for this new landscape was needed.

“Avery gave it a name: ‘Mutual enrichment by mean of personal testimony.’ That focus on the witness of one’s Christian life became a motif of Cardinal Dulles’ later years, and was powerfully testified to by his final illness,” he said.

A Mass of remembrance concelebrated by the Jesuit community of Fordham followed at the University Church. Bishop Massa served as principal celebrant, and Patrick J Ryan, S.J., the Lawrence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society, delivered the homily.

At a dinner reception at Bepler Commons, Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, recalled Cardinal Dulles’ humble nature, noting that after he was elevated to Cardinal in 2001, he pointedly declined the honorific “Your Eminence” in favor of the traditional “Father.”

Cardinal Dulles was also close friends with Edward Cardinal Egan, Archbishop of New York, he said, and when his health started to fail him in his later years, Egan visited him often and offered him a final resting place at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

“Dulles flatly told him ‘no.’ After some back and forth, he explained his reason: he wanted to be buried next to his Jesuit brothers,” Father McShane said.

“Avery Dulles was buried next to man a who taught high school math—a good guy.”

The evening was sponsored by the Spellman Hall Jesuit Community, the Office of the President, the Office of the Provost, the Office of Mission Integration and Planning, and the Center on Religion and Culture.

—Additional reporting by David Gibson and David Goodwin

This conversation is more critical than ever, said keynote speaker, Patrick J. Ryan, S.J., the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society. In the wake of the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal, it is important to recognize that sexuality has a sacred meaning in each religion.

“I want to draw your attention to how very human forces, male and female, interact with each other in the imaginative creation of worlds of faith, worlds of spirituality,” Father Ryan said. “How, in particular, do our understandings of human sexuality color how those of us who are Jews, Christians, and Muslims think about God?”

The Bible says that God created Adam, the first human being, as both male and female. (Eve was created from one of Adam’s ribs.) This duality continues to be found in all aspects of life, including marriage, Father Ryan said. It can also be seen in male and female images in the Book of Genesis and the Song of Songs. But one of the most important texts in Judaism, the Zohar, takes a step further and suggests that humanity itself “mirrors and magnifies the Lord God,” he said.  

In the same vein, Christian texts show spirituality through sexuality. For example, an autobiography by Saint Teresa of Avila, a 16th-century Christian mystic and writer, portrays the soul and God as passionate lovers, Father Ryan said. She uses graphic imagery to show the angelic piercing of her heart with the spear of God’s love: “When he drew it out, I thought he was drawing them  [her entrails]out with it and he left me completely afire with a great love for God.”

The Quran also denotes spirituality through sexual language, he said. The basmalah blessing, which begins every chapter of the Quran but one, uses words that associate “the mercy of God” with a mother’s womb.

“To connect the mercy of God with a feminine physical characteristic is to understand God’s perfection as including all that is most tender in created reality, including the generative and loving characteristics of others,” Father Ryan said.

Although much of the main lecture focused on heterosexual love, respondent Amir Hussain, Ph.D., professor of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University, took a detour from the night’s discourse to reflect on the dangers faced by the LGBTQ community.

“I think of Islamic psychologists from Los Angeles, where I live, who worry about losing their license if they are anything but heteronormative,” he said. “And I wonder how we got to that place where we can hate people for the love that God has put between them.”

For Hussain, it’s a personal issue, as he was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto during the “plague years” of the ’80s, when he said he attended one too many funerals for his friends who died of HIV and AIDS.

“We have to speak out when our gay, lesbian, queer, trans, and bisexual brothers and sisters are threatened,” Hussain said. “We have to lift up the work and voices of LGBTQ scholars and activists, such as Scott Kugle at Emory University, who remind us of the inherent dignity of all of us—regardless of our sexuality.”

The scholar who delivered the Jewish response, Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology at Fordham, compared two Biblical texts from the Old Testament: Song of Songs and Ezekiel 16. Both stories use the metaphor of a romantic partnership to show God’s relationship with Israel, she said. Only one relationship is healthy though, while the other is marred by manipulation and abuse.

Gribetz’s juxtapositions were often stark. In Song of Songs, the narrator portrays a romantic relationship between a man (God) and a woman (Jerusalem as the spouse of the Lord). Gribetz described the scenes that unfold between the lovers: “A series of kisses, love described as sweeter than wine, fragrant oils, and secluded chambers.”

Ezekiel 16, by contrast, takes a tragic turn. In it, God (a man) saves the people of Jerusalem (a woman) from slavery in Egypt, but is betrayed by the very people he rescues. The text is fraught with dark imagery: an unbathed newborn lying in the blood of her after-birth, nakedness, suffering, and violent threats.

But in these two texts, there is something to be said about humanity, Gribetz said. The stories paint a realistic portrait of the possible intersections among sexuality, spirituality, and love of God—both positive and negative.

“I chose to share with you this evening not only the positive but also the negative, not only the benevolent but also the malevolent, to highlight the empowering dimensions of religious texts, but also to acknowledge those parts of our traditions that are most problematic,” Gribetz said.

“So that we can imagine and construct together models of partnership—human and divine—that are based on mutual love and consent, rather than abuse of power and violation of dignity.”

“Our hearts go out to John and the Tognino family. It was a great gift to know Norma Tognino. She was a woman of deep faith, deep strength, and great warmth,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham. “Norma was beloved by the Fordham community, and indeed by anyone who had the great good fortune to know her. She was generous, funny, and a great friend to Fordham. We will all miss her, and she—and the Tognino family—will be in our prayers always.”

Together with her husband, Norma was among the University’s most significant donors, making major gifts to support scholarships and special-needs students. In 2007, Fordham named Tognino Hall in Duane Library in the couple’s honor.

A Warm, Reliable Presence

Norma could always be counted on to attend Fordham functions and enliven the festivities with her joyful spirit. Many in the Fordham community recalled her warmth, her down-to-earth attitude, and her penchant for making them laugh. But Norma has been missed for the last year and a half; in July 2017 she was involved in a car accident, and since then had suffered through a series of ailments.

“Until she was hospitalized, Norma never missed a Fordham event; she was a treasured member of the Fordham family,” said Robert D. Daleo, chair of the Board of Trustees. “We will miss her warmth and kindness, and her unflagging support for the University and its students, faculty, and staff. The Board of Trustees sends its love and profound condolences to the Tognino family, and hopes that Norma’s memory will forever be a comfort.”

Bronx Roots

Norma was born on July 1, 1940, to Ernestine and Ralph Borrelli, a barber. She grew up on Burke Avenue in the Bronx with three brothers, Paul, Anthony, and Ralph, all of whom worked for IBM, and all of whom predeceased her.

She and John met at a dance at St. Phillip Neri church, his parish. They married in November 1959. Later, when he was attending Fordham’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies in the evenings, she was “extremely” supportive and played an “intricate role” in his success, said John, a trader who currently owns Pepper Financial Group. His career included 36 years at Merrill Lynch, as well as terms as president and chief executive officer of the Security Traders Association and executive vice president and head of Global Sales and Member Affairs at Nasdaq. He was Fordham’s board chair from 2004 to 2012 and is a current trustee emeritus.

“Norma had a deep affection for Fordham,” he said, that began during his years as a student and continued until her death.

‘A Great Enthusiast’

Throughout her life, Norma nurtured a love for the piano. She took lessons as a young girl and later studied at Juilliard and the London School of Music when she and John lived in London from 1988 to 1991.

“She was very shy and she would never play to show off; she would enjoy playing when no one was around,” John said. “She played mostly classical music.”

John and Norma had three children: Katherine; John Jr.; and Michael, a 1992 Fordham Gabelli School of Business graduate. When they were young, Norma was very active in their public schools in Ardsley, New York, where the Togninos had moved after spending their first six or seven years of married life in the Bronx. Norma also served as a member of the women’s auxiliary at Our Lady of Perpetual Help church in Ardsley. The couple eventually made their home in Bronxville, and when her children were grown, Norma worked as a furniture buyer in Westchester.

“She was devoted to her family,” John said. “She was a great enthusiast with great respect for everyone.”

A Love of Travel

That enthusiasm was evident on the many international trips–several to Italy– that the couple took with Fordham’s Board of Trustees, when Norma would often gather the group for fun dinners and lead the way on shopping excursions.

“You could always count on her and John for a great time and a lot of warmth and hospitality and genuine friendship,” said former trustee Pat Nazemetz, TMC ’71, GSAS ’89, who, together with her husband, Jim, socialized with the Togninos in Westchester and traveled with them as well.

“When we traveled, Norma could always be relied on for finding the best shops and doing lots of power shopping when we had any kind of breaks from sightseeing,” said Nazemetz.

Patrick Ryan, S.J., Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society at Fordham, accompanied the Togninos on a trip to the Amalfi Coast.

“They were my hosts. We had an awful lot of fun,” he said, adding that Norma “was very unpretentious, very warm, had not lost the common touch at all.”

Father Ryan also played a part in toasting the couple for their 50th wedding anniversary, which they celebrated with a party in Tognino Hall in 2009.

“I made up a song for that,” he said. “It was sung to the tune of Ode to Joy.”

It began: “Sing with me a song of Norma:/ Fifty years ago today/ She was wed, not just pro forma/ To the guy she brought to bay.

And a later verse, calling out the unassuming nature for which the couple was known:

“Keep us mindful, God our Father/ Of the way their parents toiled/ Making sure, for all the bother/ Each grew straight and was not spoiled.”

Nazemetz, now a trustee fellow, said that in the nearly 20 years that she has known the Togninos, Norma “has always been [John’s] rock.”

“She was a kind, caring, giving person. I think of her as the big sister we all like to have,” she said. “She was sensitive and thoughtful, but she also had a toughness about her.”

Whatever struggles she might have been going through—a fall or an illness, for example, “it never wore her down,” Nazemetz said.

One time, Nazemetz and Norma were discussing whether they should go to Las Vegas, which Norma loved, or travel to Italy.

“Her comment to me was, ‘I want to do it all.’ She had a very can-do attitude and spirit, and always made people feel welcomed.” Though the Togninos were people of means, Nazemetz said, “you never got any of that vibe.”

“It was just, ‘I’m that kid from the Bronx who met my husband in the Bronx, and those are our roots, and we’re proud of them and we’re proud to be part of the team.’”

In addition to John, Norma is survived by her children, Katherine Albanese and her husband, Mark; John Jr. and his wife, Teri; and Michael and his partner, Jennifer, and the Togninos’ five grandchildren, Christopher, John III, Michael Jr., Joseph, and Isabella.

A Mass of Christian Burial will be held on Friday, Dec. 7, at 11 a.m. at the University Church on Fordham’s Rose Hill campus. There will not be a wake. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to the Tognino Family Endowed Scholarship Fund at Fordham or to the Alexander Tognino Foundation, 547 Saw Mill River Road, Ardsley, NY 10502.

In a remarkable departure from the lecture’s usual scholarly tone, Father Ryan included in his presentation a personal narrative that was poignant and relevant to the evening’s topic. He spoke of his father, Paddy Ryan Lacken (1898-1944), who had been arrested and sentenced to death during the civil war that broke out after the failure of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Peace Treaty. Mistakenly sent to a very large prison camp in the Curragh of Kildare, he managed to escape execution by disguising himself and going on the run within the prison camp.

“Oral tradition in the family says that my father, less than 25 years of age at the time, shaved off his hair and grew a mustache, even using actor’s makeup to disguise himself,” said Father Ryan. “I am glad he did escape capital punishment in 1923. I would not be here tonight had he not.”

Father Ryan also culled from his experience as a scholar in North and West Africa for the semi-annual ‘trialogue,’ which presents viewpoints from the world’s three great monotheistic faith traditions on a contemporary topic

Personalizing capital punishment is often an innate part of the debate on the topic, said Pierre M. Gentin, the evening’s respondent from the Jewish perspective and a partner at the law firm of Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP.

He noted that Jews across the spectrum, from Reform to Conservative to Orthodox, generally find capital punishment anathema because of their shared history of violence, from the crusades to the pogroms to the Holocaust.

“We have an acute awareness of how easily the powerful can put people to death,” he said.

However, Gentin said that it’s easy to ponder the dignity of life and forgiveness in the abstract; it’s another matter when a family member is killed.

“It’s another thing when it’s your child, your parent, or your brother and sister that’s getting stabbed or shot or blown up in a bus,” he said. “The question of capital punishment is not so easily dismissed.”

Gentin said that giving and taking life are “God-like actions” that require serious contemplation.

“It’s absolutely final,” he said of execution. “Human beings have a place in this world that’s a unique place: We are a form of animal that can actually refrain from punishing each other in this final way … I think it has to give one pause as a religious person, but I don’t think it’s a simple question.”

Delivering the response from the Muslim perspective, Ebru Turan, Ph.D., assistant professor of history at Fordham, blamed the reintroduction of capital punishment in Muslim majority nations on the “growing pressure of political Islam.”

“This trend is the fundamental issue that underlies the acts of jihadi violence perpetrated against those who have allegedly insulted or blasphemed Islam in recent years,” she said.

Turan said that Shari‘a-based criminal law replaced European-inspired statutes in the later decades of the 20th century. But Shari‘a laws had rarely been used for capital punishment in the pre-colonial past.

Starting in the 1970s, she said, the pressure of political Islamization brought back harsh disciplines known as “hudud” punishments. She agreed with a statement made by Father Ryan that contemporary advocates of Shari‘a law often disregard the stringent restrictions on capital punishment that were traditionally observed.

“Several verses of the Quran underline the importance of showing clemency and forgiveness for the believers,” she said.

Likewise, Father Ryan said that the “eye for an eye” passage so frequently quoted from the Book of Exodus and used in defense of capital punishment was never meant to have a by-the-book application.

“This law of retaliation was not interpreted literally in ancient Israel, but was understood metaphorically, designating monetary compensation to be paid to a victim by a perpetrator,” he said.

Turan said that the Quran also “strongly urges” that family members of murder victims accept “blood money and not demand the execution of the killer.” And while the Torah also indicates that a Jewish court can impose the death penalty, the Talmud elaborates that the court, known as a Sanhedrin, must be composed of 23 judges.

“In a seemingly counterintuitive ruling—and yet one emblematic of Judaism’s concerns about the death penalty—if all of the Sanhedrin’s judges were unanimous in imposing a death sentence, the accused was set free on the theory that if not a single judge could side with the accused, there was something wrong with that court,” he said.

Father Ryan argued that for Christians, there is no room for strict retaliation in light of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, in which he said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.”

If any doubt existed that Catholics could still support capital punishment, Father Ryan said that Pope Francis’ recent revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church declares it inadmissible in all circumstances.

“It is better by far to judge not lest you be judged, as Jesus warns us, and especially when judgment leads to capital punishment,” said Father Ryan. “Reversing capital punishment at a later time is never possible. To use some West African pidgin English—the most expressive language I know—it is better to ‘Lef’ am for God.’ Leave it up to God.”

Imitation can take on many forms—behavior, manner of prayer, and even dress, said Father Ryan, the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society at Fordham. He cited several traditional and conservative aspects of imitation that eschew modernity.

‘A Clear Path of God’s Command’

He noted that the dress and appearance of Hasidic Jews mirrors that of past rabbis, “mystical masters” known as zaddikim. And while their dress may look different from modern street clothes to an outsider, he said, it is through “their very difference that they demonstrate their imitation of past rabbis and their fidelity to God.”

“To imitate one’s zaddik, to walk in the paths of ancestors in the faith, lies close to the heart of what the faith of Israel has meant for nearly four millennia,” he said.

Likewise, in Islam, accounts of what Muhammad said and did were written down to guide “requirements of ritual purity” that validate worship and all other aspects of life.

“We have put you on a clear path of God’s command. Follow it and do not follow the vagaries of those who know nothing,” Father Ryan said, quoting the Qur’an (45:18).

“Muslims have taken [this]divinely guided way of proceeding in every aspect of life more seriously and more literally than have Christians; in this they more closely resemble Orthodox Jews,” he said.

Each religion varies on the degree to which the followers adhere to such imitations, he said. In the case of Christianity, he cited St. Paul: “Be imitators of me as I am of Christ” (1 Cor 11:1).

He noted that the monastic movements in first-millennium Christianity withdrew from the “corrupting secular world” while “Carmelites Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustinians, most prominently, sometimes engaged with the secular world but also withdrew from it into their convents from time to time.” In the late 14th century, however, starting in the eastern Netherlands, the Devotio Moderna movement appealed to laity and the lower ranks of the clergy, urging them to engage with the world but to eschew its corrupting standards, imitating the poverty and simplicity of Christ. The movement began with popular Catholic preacher Geert Grote, who died in 1384, but was most famously memorialized by Thomas à Kempis and his devotional book Imitation of Christ.

Father Ryan noted that in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, the one making the exercise asks to “to imitate [Jesus] in enduring every outrage and all contempt, and utter poverty, both actual and spiritual.”

Imitation in the Age of Smartphones

Following the lecture, the conversation took a contemporary turn when the evening’s moderator, William F. Kuntz Jr., a judge of the Second Federal Court in the Eastern District Court of New York, reflected on whether it was possible—in this age of smartphones—to turn away from modernity and imitate God and the prophets in a traditional manner.

“What would each of the faith traditions say about the innovations of Facebook and the internet?” he asked.

“There’s a strand with every religion that has a problem with any innovation,” said Rabbi Daniel Polish, Ph.D., of Congregation Shir Chadash in Poughkeepsie, one of the lecture’s respondents. “There’s a tension between those that refuse to adapt and early adapters.”

Father Ryan agreed. “There were condemnations of the railroad in the 19th century by the papacy,” he said.

Yet times change and technology moves forward. So how is one to adapt to modern times and yet remain faithful?

Zaki Saritoprak, who holds the Nursi Chair in Islamic Studies of John Carroll University and was also a respondent, said that like any technology, its value depends on how it’s used.

“You have a car; you can drive to a good place or bad place,” he said. “If [technology]prevents you from your major duties, like your responsibility to pray, then it becomes problematic.”

And yet, the same innovations can help with prayer, said Rabbi Polish, noting how many religious texts are now available online.

“The extreme Orthodox have made use of cell phones to access vast storehouses of information,” he said.

He recalled a recent service within the Hasidic community. “When it comes time to pray, they all pull out the cell phone and open to the appropriate app,” he said. “We were praying literally off our phones.”

Related Coverage: Anthropologist Researches Internet Use in Ultra-Orthodox Communities

For many, these momentous events are marked through religious rituals. Birth can be celebrated with a baptism or a bris. An Indian marriage ceremony is as solemn and beautiful as one held in Spain. And a funeral in New Orleans is as celebratory as an Irish wake.

Sacred, a new feature-length film, explores these religious rituals around the globe from birth to death. It is a rare documentary in that there are no narrators. The lives of the subjects tell the story alone.

The film will premiere at DocNYC Film Festival on Nov. 12, and Nov. 14 at IFC Center. It will have additional premieres at festivals in Amsterdam and Tokyo in the next month.

“It’s a beautiful film and truly profound,” said the film’s producer William Baker, Ph.D., Fordham’s Claudio Acquaviva Chair and director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Center for Media, Public Policy, and Education at the Graduate School of Education.

Baker said that the center was intricately involved in making the film for New York’s Public Broadcasting Station (WNET/THIRTEEN). The center also commissioned Juilliard composer Edward Bilous to write and score the music and recommended Academy Award winner Thomas Lennon as director. Patrick Ryan, S.J., Fordham’s Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society, served as a consultant on the film.

“We want to show how people of all faiths use their beliefs to go through life—from birth through our death,” Baker said. “There are great similarities; in a sense we’re all doing the same things.”

Lennon’s process in making the film was as diverse as its subject matter, Baker said. Lennon sourced contributions from more than 40 filmmakers and asked them to record intimate scenes from more than 25 countries. The storyline follows life’s journey from birth to death in a linear fashion, but it diverges to explore the many ways that people around the globe experience faith.

With a $3 million budget, the film was a costly project for public television, said Baker. It was largely possible because of a $1 million gift from WNET board member George O’Neal and close friend and supporter Janet Carrus.

With seven Emmy awards behind him, Baker said he knew he had to create “something special.” The film will make the festival circuit and will likely be shown in art house cinemas before being aired on PBS next year. Baker is also hoping the film can be shown on campus as well.

While Baker said the project was “gestating” for about six years, it took only two years to complete. He said the process has confirmed his belief that faith—no matter the religion—is critical to human survival.

“We know now that religion has been blamed for a lot of the problems that exist in the world, but it should be praised for helping people get though life,” he said.

Beneath the philosophical arguments was a deeply personal connection to the discussion, via the bloodshed that engulfed Ireland a century ago.

In Making War, Making Peace: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Attitudes, Patrick J. Ryan, SJ, the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society, explored the ways in which Judaism, Christianity and Islam balance the  fraught issue of when people have a right to wage war, and when not.

Divine Authorization

Regarding war in ancient Israel, Father Ryan said that Israel’s faith centered not only on liberation from bondage but also on divinely authorized territoriality. This meant the settlement of Abraham’s descendants in erez Yisrael, “the land of Israel.”

At the same time, Father Ryan said that Jewish faith also embraces a vision of God who has compassion not only for the people of Israel but also for their enemies. In the Talmud, God admonishes angels celebrating the Exodus, saying of the dying Egyptians, “My handiwork is drowning in the sea. Would you utter a song before me?”

Christian Principles for Just War

In the 5th century, Augustine was the first Christian theologian to develop a concept of just war, said Father Ryan. Medieval definition of just war, however, sometimes involved a certain “fatal subjectivity,” especially when Crusaders took up arms to fight Muslims as a form not of war but of doing penitential pilgrimage for their sins.

Thomas Aquinas offered three principles to define just war in the 13th century, said Father Ryan. One principle, “rightful intention,” presumed that just wars avenge injuries inflicted, a principle that is vulnerable to immense possibilities for misuse.

Father Ryan also quoted Aquinas to the effect that sometimes “‘war is declared by a legitimate authority and for a just cause, but is nevertheless rendered unlawful through a wicked intention.’”

As examples of wicked intentions and the wicked actions that flow from them, Father Ryan pointed to “enhanced interrogations” by the CIA in 2002 and the water boarding and sexual humiliation of enemy combatants by U.S. army personnel at Abu Ghraib in 2004, as well as the deployment of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

The Meaning of Jihad

Regarding Islamic faith, Father Ryan disputed the notion that jihad means “holy war.” Jihad originally denoted “struggle,” especially the struggle to recuperate what was lost when the prophet Muhammad and his companions had to leave Mecca for Medina. Jihad cannot justify terrorist violence, nor is it ever to be waged against fellow Muslims, as is done by ISIS.

Father Ryan singled out Bacha Khan, a 20th-century Pushtun from Pakistan, as the greatest Muslim pacifist struggler of the past century. Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, Khan formed an unarmed Pashtun Muslim militia that practiced non-violence even when confronted with lethal force by the British in India.

Respondents to Father Ryan’s lecture included Sarit Kattan Gribetz, assistant professor of theology at Fordham, and Mehnaz Afridi, assistant professor of religious studies at Manhattan College. Professor Gribetz spoke about the homelessness war so often produces, citing the example of her own father’s lonely departure from Baghdad for Israel at the age of 8. Professor Afridi, a Muslim specialist on the Holocaust, spoke of the way Holocaust victims have tried to cope with the horrors of war they have experienced and have even thought of themselves as waging war to make peace.

A Family Narrative on the 100th Anniversary of the Irish Republic

Father Ryan began and ended his lecture with a family narrative about war and peace dating back to the Irish struggle for independence a hundred year ago. Because of wrongs inflicted against the Irish under British rule, the leaders of the 1916 Easter uprising argued that their struggle was just, said Father Ryan. They ascribed to the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic what Aquinas called “the authority of a ruler.”

“Both making war and making peace are arduous tasks,” Ryan contended. To illustrate this he detailed the history of a father in Tipperary taken hostage in the Irish war of independence by Harry Biggs, a much-hated British District Inspector, in retaliation against the father’s two IRA sons.

Biggs was ambushed and killed while driving on a country road on May 14th, 1921. A civilian passenger was also killed by accident—Winifred Barrington, the 25-year-old daughter of local British settler gentry. The man who killed Biggs, said Father Ryan, was the older son of the hostage Biggs had maltreated.

Elected to Dail Eireann in the subsequently created Irish Free State, the man who shot Biggs refused to take the required oath of allegiance to the King. Emigrating to New York in 1929, he married and started a family, but died in 1944, just after his 45th birthday.

Father Ryan concluded his presentation with a prayer for the dead. “May the souls of the signers of the Proclamation executed a century ago this spring, the souls of Winifred Barrington and Harry Biggs, and the soul of the man who shot Biggs in May 1921—my father, Paddy Ryan ‘Lacken’—rest at long last in peace.”

On Nov. 10 and 11, Patrick Ryan, SJ, the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society, made that brief document the focus of his fall McGinley lecture.

The document, 1,152 words in length, dedicated 433 words to the Jewish faith but only 133 words to Islam.

“Each section deserves careful analysis; each has a pre-history as well as a post-history with which we are living to the present day,” he said.

Father Ryan said some of the document’s pre-history included a tradition of anti-Semitic bias among Christians that cried out for “authoritative rejection” by the Church.

Father Ryan noted that one passage, in particular, repeated the early Church’s rejection of the teaching of the second-century heretic, Marcion of Sinope, who rejected everything that was Jewish in the Christian tradition. Paraphrasing St. Paul’s teaching that reaffirms God’s continuing love for the Jews, Father Ryan showed how the Council document rejects centuries of anti-Jewish hatred.

“[B]ut as regards election [the Jews]are beloved, for the sake of their ancestors; for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable,” Father Ryan quoted from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans.

“Nineteen centuries of Gentile-Christian hatred of the Jews as enemies of Jesus, himself a Jew, are here clearly renounced,” he said.

Father Ryan noted that the document’s short section on Muslims is not as detailed as the section about Jews. However, even the statement that the Church “regards Muslims with esteem” is an about-face in Church attitudes, very different from a prayer composed by the papacy just four decades earlier that asked God to “illuminate the minds of those still involved in the darkness of idolatry or of Islamism.”

“The document recognizes the centrality of Abraham to the faith of the Muslims,” he said, but it also acknowledges the long history of tension between Christians and Muslims that reached its apex during the Crusades.

“Nostra aetate, brief as it is, and especially its section on Muslims, marks a starting point for the process of dialogue between Christians and Muslims—perhaps even among Jews, Christians, and Muslims—that must be continued today and tomorrow for the sake of humankind and for the glory of God.”

The McGinley Lecture was followed with responses from Jewish and Muslim perspectives. This year’s Jewish response came from Magda Teter, PhD, the recently appointed Shvidler Professor of Judaic Studies.

Teter said the document represents both tradition and change in a complex way, and should be defined more by what followed it than by its actual content. It became a springboard for new dialogue between Jews and Christians. Still, she said the conciliatory voice was charged with facing down centuries of blame for the death of Christ.

“Jews lived this curse around the world,” she said.

Professor Hussein Rashid, PhD, a faculty member from Hofstra University, shared the Muslim point of view. He said that while Nostra aetate certainly spurred new conversations, it was burdened by a cultural memory that carries hope alongside stigma.

Rashid said he found hope in Pope Francis’ recent visit to the 9/11 memorial, where he said the stigma of the “cultural memory that Muslims are the violent Other” still lingers.

“Yet in listening to the words of Pope Francis spoken there, we understand that he saw the location as a transforming space in our relationship with each other,” said Rashid.

“It is in Pope Francis that we see the embodiment of Nostra aetate . . . the rejection of the worst in us and a commitment to the best in us, inspired by the vision of a more peaceful society, [and]the transformation through acts and a deep listening to each other that is our challenge for the next 50 years.”